Social scientists such as Szlemko say that people carry around three kinds of territorial spaces in their heads. One is personal territory -- like a home, or a bedroom. The second kind involves space that is temporarily yours -- an office cubicle or a gym locker. The third kind is public territory: park benches, walking trails -- and roads.
[T]he most recent research I’ve been doing, and I haven’t published on this yet, but I’m finding links between the work of H.P. Lovecraft and influence of that on 2012. Michael Coe was a huge Lovecraft fan, even. I’m working on a manuscript on that right now. But Lovecraft is at the root of a lot of the ideas here, like the cycles of destruction, for instance. That’s not Mayan, that’s Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself had a lot of skepticism and felt that spiritualism was appropriate for fiction but didn’t believe any of it in everyday reality, and he kind of used his fiction as a way to mock those beliefs a little. But now that’s being used as reality.
In DC, it's touron season (I will leave that neologism to the student). It occurred to me just now, from the bar of Hill Country on 7th in Penn Quarter, that tourists dress in light clothing more often than not because the new environment reduces their situational awareness, and that's why they are easy marks. Discuss.
PC Magazine et al have articles today about how our Russian friends are going to scuttle the ISS in 2020. So why aren't we planning a moon base? If we need something to fire human imagination, I can"t think of anything better.
The development of the Russian oil industry in Salkhallin, an island almost the size of Japan and other areas of the Russian Far East, combined with Central Asia's oil reserves, will be more than sufficient to replace Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other OPEC producers of the Middle East in their entirety as far as future U.S. strategic energy requirements are concerned.
NYT: In Robotics, Human-Style Perce
Why don't we figure out a way to interface these robots with people who are in near-vegetative states--the ones whom we know are locked inside their bodies yet likely conscious? They regain the ability to act in some ways, not to mention communicating again, and we learn from them about both their condition and the robot interface.
Still reading this (longish) article, but I can tell already that there's lots to pull from it. The responses on the Gen-X list are both predictable in some instances, which is fascinating within the context of the article, and helpful in formulating counterarguments.
Here's to brain chemistry.
What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time.
WITS is best described as the very nerdy, slightly tipsy, younger cousin of A Prairie Home Companion. There are authors, there are musicians, there are the creators of MST3K heckling from a balcony seat. In other words, you'd love it.
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